BIRMINGHAM, Alabama – When Andretti Global driver Marcus Ericsson saw the news that IndyCar had disqualified Team Penske driver Josef Newgarden six weeks after his apparent victory in the March 10, Firestone Grand Prix, he thought it was “fake news.”
“I thought IndyCar got hacked on its social media channels,” Ericsson said to a question posed by NBCSports.com. “It was a big shock, for the whole paddock. I had not heard anything about it. It came completely out of the blue for me.”
His Andretti Global teammate Colton Herta was even more blunt when asked whether he believed Newgarden’s explanation that he thought the push-to-pass rules had been changed to allow its use on the starts and restarts this season.
“No, that’s bulls**t,” Herta said after watching Newgarden’s news conference Friday morning. “That’s wrong. No. He knows. But if he thought that, why didn’t he push it at the start? He didn’t push it at the start. He pushed it on the restarts. You would think when everybody stacked up the most, you would push it. So that’s a lie.”
It was a wild day of emotion and commentary long before any cars took the track at Barber Motorsports Park for Sunday’s Children’s of Alabama Indy Grand Prix – the third race of the 2024 IndyCar Series season. It began with an emotional Newgarden choking back tears, accepting full responsibility for using the “push-to-pass” system when he shouldn’t have in the season-opening race.
Here were some reactions from IndyCar title contenders during Friday morning media availability before practice at the road course east of Birmingham:
Pato O’Ward, declared winner of St. Pete after Newgarden’s disqualification, Arrow McLaren: “It was definitely disappointing to see because those are teams and drivers that you look up to and you’re like, ‘Hey, these guys are the benchmark.’ Maybe we were the benchmark one weekend, but we were stolen out of a better result because of X, Y, and Z. But we know that we’re racing fair and square, and we do it to win races. Everybody’s here to win races and I think a gray area is one thing, but there were rules. There is a rule on this, so you can’t really say it’s a gray area. I’m confident in the team that’s behind me. We race with integrity, and we know the rules. We know the rules that are at our disposal, and we take advantages of whatever we can within those rules. Sometimes it’s tough to look at it in one way or another, but the point there’s only one way to look at it and that is the rule, and you can’t just break it and expect it to get away with it. I’m thankful for Long Beach warmup.”
Herta, seven-time IndyCar winner, Andretti Global: “I could believe that St. Pete was a mistake. I could totally believe that. Their hybrid testing car right was probably a different chassis, and they probably just took that whatever the coding is. I don’t know exactly how it works, but they probably implemented it. I believe that, and that that’s possible. But what’s not possible is to go to Long Beach again with it with the intent to use it again.” (On Newgarden believing the push-to-pass rules on starts and restarts had changed.) “I know that the team would have told us if that was (true), I know that they would have made a huge point about it that you can use it on the starts. I know that it probably would have been said in the driver’s meeting, too. Like, ‘Hey, the rules have changed, remember you can use it now.’ It just would have been mentioned. If you think ‘Penske Perfect’ and all that, you would think they would have mentioned it, too. At the end of the day, it’s a Penske problem. Even though they took advantage of it, and that’s wrong. It shouldn’t have been in the car to begin with. I think some of what Josef said wasn’t true. I don’t believe it, and so maybe what he said is true about it taking a little bit (to regain the trust of his rivals), but we’ll see.”
Graham Rahal, six-time IndyCar winner, Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing: “I didn’t appreciate some of the quotes that were made. I’ll say that. Like, I didn’t appreciate some of the excuses that were made because I don’t think that they’re valid excuses. I was kind of OK with, ‘All right, well, this is a penalty, yeah, sure, whatever.’ But then when the stories kept coming out, I kept reading the quotes, I just thought to myself, ‘Now you’re just digging yourself into a hole that’s just absolute B.S.’ I just don’t appreciate that. In the spirit of sportsmanship, like screw up, you do something, fess up, move on with life. I’ll just leave it at that.
“I think the only thing I can say, you can take it as you wish, but is what I said: I don’t appreciate the poor excuses and the digging to kind of explain it. At the end of the day, it’s fairly simple. You had access to something that nobody else did, and that’s the facts. That’s it. I think it’s really, really disappointing to kind of read some of that stuff. But aside from that, we’ll go race this weekend. Look, do I think it changes the end result? No, they’re damn good. They’ve shown today they’re going to be fast, they’re going to be up front, but...
“I would say everybody’s always trying to push the limitations in motorsports in general. But I don’t think that cheating is as common in IndyCar as it may be in NASCAR. I really don’t. I think there’s a lot of things that you can do. We just talked about dampers. The damper development is a massive area in this sport that a lot of the big teams are constantly working on. But for us, I just think everybody’s going to try. Back in the days when they had ride height limitations, there were guys always pushing the limits on how much they could get away with bottoming before wearing the dome skid at Indy or Texas or places before you got busted. But I don’t think that cheating is as quite as commonplace here as maybe others. But I also think this is a little bit of a shock, too, because, I mean, utilizing overtake is not something I would have ever even thought was generally possible. In fact, I didn’t know that that was something a team could have any control over at all. I was very shocked when I read the news.
“Everybody’s going to push the limits, push the limits. I’m sure in the past there’s been fuel capacity stuff, a variety of different things that people have wondered about, so...I don’t think it’s as common as NASCAR, for sure.”
Scott Dixon, six-time series champion, Chip Ganassi Racing: “It’s good IndyCar stepped up. I think they were in a situation where they had to. It’s good that it was dealt with in the way that it was. Hopefully that deters some situations down the road.” (Did he believe Penske’s explanation that it was an oversight of coding from hybrid testing?) “No. Every team did hybrid testing. It’s not a part of code that you needed to change for hybrid testing. So, I don’t know where they’re going with that one.” (On Newgarden saying he believed the rule had changed this year to allow push-to-pass on the start and restarts.) “It’s hard to speak for (Newgarden), but that’s been the norm for the last 10 years. We did initially have, I think, (push-to-pass) on starts and restarts back in the day. But we specifically went to what we did to eliminate the waste of OT for races because everybody would use it. I think that might even go back to when you only got 15 pushes of it and you would use one on a start or restart, then you’re eliminating most of them, especially when you had a lot of cautions, but I don’t know where you’d get that idea. I haven’t dived into it too much and it’s relevant. I guess maybe they’re lucky in some ways that they got caught when they did before the race in Long Beach. It’s not a good look. The issue you have is separation of church and state. You’ve got a team that owns the series (and) owns one of the engines that’s raced in it. Yeah, it a tough one to deal with. I don’t think there was any other option.”
Alex Palou, two-time IndyCar champion, Chip Ganassi Racing: “I was shocked and interested about what was going on. I think it was a shocking moment for everybody to learn what it was, who did it and in which conditions did it. I think the paddock is pretty pissed (at) the team. I don’t know, it depends on how strong mentally they are. I’m sure it’s not easy. I wouldn’t like to be in that position. I think the toughest part is when you see the other teams and other drivers and they look at you differently, that’s the hardest thing and especially when there’s so many people and everybody looks at you the same way and it’s repeatedly, constantly, so they keep on remembering. you without saying anything. I think that’s the toughest part. It’s not the end of the world. I mean it’s bad, but nobody killed anybody.”
Ericsson, 2022 Indy 500 winner, Andretti Global: “It’s not great for the series. It’s problematic, for sure. You like to think the best of everyone, so that’s what I would like to think. But it’s hard to understand how it happened and it’s even harder to understand how it didn’t get noticed during St. Pete and especially after. I could understand that in some ways but also like the way Penske runs things and the way I think Josef does things, it’s hard to believe that they’ve missed on something like that as a significant thing. But if that is what they say, you have to believe what they’re saying. It’s a bit hard to understand. The integrity to the series is super important, for sure. I think everyone would agree on that, including Josef and Team Penske. That’s why it’s problematic, obviously. I think it’s good that IndyCar was very harsh, but they were very strong penalties for what happened.
“Everyone wants to push boundaries, but you need to be within the rules. That’s the way we have to go racing so I don’t think I need to remind anyone in my team about that. It’s not something I’m worried about, for sure not. I’m hoping that we can move on and focus on the racing. I think that it’s not going to be good for anyone if we talk about this for the rest of the year and have that as a focus.”
Follow Bruce Martin on Twitter at @BruceMartin_500
